Grid Vulnerability Exposed as Costa del Sol Power Network Narrowly Escapes Total Blackout A major wildfire near Benahavís reveals acute structural fragility in the Costa del Sol electricity network, prompting demands to unblock stalled high-voltage projects. A Wildfire That Came Too Close to the Wires Firefighters had barely finished damping down the hillsides around the Ermita del Rosario hermitage near Benahavís when engineers quietly admitted how close the western Costa del Sol had come to losing power altogether. The blaze tore through roughly 3.8 square kilometres of scrubland before crews brought it under control, and while no homes were lost and no structures were seriously damaged, the fire crept close enough to the Costasol substation to force a rethink of just how exposed the region's electricity supply really is. That substation, tucked beside the AP-7 motorway, is not simply one piece of infrastructure among many. It is, at present, the only fully functioning high-voltage facility feeding bulk power to local substations along a stretch of coastline running from Estepona through to Fuengirola. Three such hubs were planned to share that load. Only one works. Why Costasol Matters So Much Red Eléctrica, the state operator responsible for Spain's transmission network, built Costasol on an exposed hillside that engineers now concede is vulnerable to exactly the kind of brushfire that swept through in recent days. Summer heat and tinder-dry vegetation make the area a recurring fire risk, and this was not a near miss in some remote corner of the province — it sat right beside the single point of failure for an entire coastal grid. Had the fire forced an emergency shutdown of Costasol, the consequences would have reached far beyond a temporary inconvenience. Technicians briefed on the incident warned that restoring full service after such a shutdown could have taken weeks rather than hours, given the complexity of re-energising a high-voltage system of this scale. For hospitals, hotels and the tens of thousands of households that depend on that supply through peak tourist season, a prolonged outage of that length would have been genuinely severe. Two Missing Pylons, Seven Years of Delay The obvious question is why a second substation, also in Benahavís, isn't already sharing that burden. The answer is almost absurd in its simplicity: it has stood finished and unused since 2019, waiting on a 220,000-volt transmission line that was never completed because two pylons were never erected. Those two pylons have been held up by a legal dispute between the regional administration and a private landowner over access to the land and the environmental paperwork needed to build on it. The standoff dragged on for seven years while a fully built, modern substation sat idle just a few kilometres from the one facility the entire coast was relying on. There has been movement at last. Spain's Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the Junta de Andalucía and Red Eléctrica, clearing the legal obstacle that kept the landowner's objections in play. What remains is procedural but far from trivial: the regional high court still needs to issue formal entry orders before installation crews, accompanied by state security forces, can actually go onto the land and put the pylons up. Until that paperwork moves, the second substation remains exactly what it has been for seven years — a finished facility with nothing connecting it to the grid. What Comes Next for the Coast Business associations and town halls across the Costa del Sol are pressing the courts and the regional government to move quickly now that the legal question has been settled. Their argument is straightforward: population growth along this coast shows no sign of slowing, and every summer brings fresh records in electricity demand as tourist numbers swell alongside the resident population. Once the Benahavís substation is finally connected, the coast will have something it has lacked for years — a genuine double-circuit network, with two high-voltage hubs capable of covering for each other. That redundancy is the whole point. A wildfire, a transformer fault or routine maintenance work would no longer mean betting the entire western seaboard's power supply on a single substation beside a motorway on a fire-prone hillside. For now, though, Costasol remains the only thing standing between the coast and a blackout nobody wants to test twice.